Title The Time Ships Series --- Author Stephen Baxter Cover Art Bob Eggleton Publisher Eos - 2000 First Printing Harper Voyager - 1996 Category Science Fiction Warnings None Main Characters --- Main Elements Time Travel

There is a secret passage through time...and it leads all the way to the end of Eternity. But the journey has a terrible cost. It alters not only the future but the "present" in which we live.

A century after the publication of H. G. Wells' immortal The Time Machine, Stephen Baxter, today's most acclaimed new "hard SF" author, and the acknowledged heir to the visionary legacy of Wells, Heinlein and Clarke, returns to the distant conflict between the Eloi and the Morlocks in a story that is at once an exciting expansion, and a radical departure based on the astonishing new understandings of quantum physics.

Earlier this year I read The Time Machine by H.G. Wells but frankly wasn't all that impressed by it. Having read a lot of Lovecraft recently, finding the future populated by abandoned temples and white apes seemed almost cliched at this point (though Wells came first). The story was also very short, the explanations as to how the world ended up this way were left to the narrator to try to guess at, and the narrator himself was somewhat annoying in his superiority towards the descendants of the human race.

Now Baxter had done an ok job with the sequel to The War of the Worlds, and I felt there was a lot of room here to do even better than the original, especially given The Time Ships was written a hundred years later and we have so much more science around time, quantum physics and multi-universes. A hundred years from now this book will probably seem a little quaint too, but at least there's some reasonable science going on behind the scenes, which was lacking in The Time Machine, and which impressed me so much in the War of the Worlds (Wells was wrong about many things there but at least it felt like he worked out some science as to how a Martian would evolve).

So our Time Traveller, still without a name which I thought was a nice touch and consistent with the original, hops back on his time machine in an attempt to save Weena who had been abducted by Morlocks and abandoned by him. However as he gets closer to her time period he realizes something is wrong. The very fact that he had gone back to his time and told his story has now changed the future! The book had my interest now.

There aren't any Elois but the Morlocks are living in a kind of Dyson Sphere around the sun and instead of being degenerate apes, they are more advanced that modern humans. And soon, we are travelling through time, sometimes backwards far enough that humans haven't evolved yet, and forward enough that millions of years have passed and humans have left the Earth, or at least evolved in that period of time to no longer be human. Which was a thought I've always had, see we always worry about the human race being wiped out by nuclear war or an asteroid strike, both very valid concerns, but even if we seed the galaxy with our descendents, Homo Sapiens will cease to exist through simple evolution. We are in a sense doomed to extinction even if we survive.

Now time travel, quantum physics and all that stuff can really mess with your mind, but I enjoy trying to wrap my mind around those kinds of things. I watch every documentary I can about astronomy since the distances, the time scales, the vastness is just so mind bewildering, and the quantum world downright impossible to even envision as it doesn't even make sense. Throw in other dimensions and other universes, and this books goes from Robinson Crusoe moments to mucking about inside the head of Stephen Hawking and beyond.

So yes, I enjoyed it! Even though the narrator continues to be a bit of a jerk, and has difficulty accepting something like a Morlock being more advanced than him, I guess a kind of racism really (speciesism?) but that just helped to tie everything into the original tale, making it feel like a true sequel and not just something inspired by. It's not perfect, the pacing can at times slow to a crawl while the ending felt ridiculously sped up. And while the original was too short, this was perhaps a smidge too long.

But if you were curious to see what Wells might have been able to come up with, had he had the science that came after him, this might give a hint of it. I recommend The Time Ships if you read The Time Machine and wished there had been more to it, but if you want to try it out, reading the original is a must.